The present invention relates generally to data migration and relates more specifically to the migration of distributed applications.
A distributed application is an application in which presentation, application processing, and data management are performed as logically separate processes over multiple cooperating servers. These servers might include, for example, one or more hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) servers, application servers, and/or relational database management systems.
When a distributed application is to be migrated to a new environment (e.g., a cloud environment), it is often difficult to estimate how the application will perform in the new environment. For example, some software packages may conflict with each other in the new environment and negatively impact application performance. However, it is difficult to accurately estimate the application's performance in the new environment without actually installing and configuring the application in the new environment. Although the distributed application could be completely re-installed and re-configured in the new environment, this approach is not ideal for several reasons. For one, installation is complicated by the subtle interdependencies between the application tiers, potentially complex configurations, and application specific treatments. Moreover, it is costly and labor-intensive to migrate and store all of the data associated with a distributed application.
Other approaches that avoid completely re-installing the distributed application in the new environment have drawbacks as well. For instance, micro-benchmarks could be run in the current environment and the new environment to learn performance differences, and performance models could then be built for the current environment and translated into the new environment using the micro-benchmarks. However, the weaknesses of the selected modeling technique carry over into the results, and the model translation introduces inaccuracies as well. Alternatively, the application could be profiled in-depth to construct a straw man application that mimics the application's resource consumption. However, it is difficult to accurately mimic certain resource consumption and execution behaviors such as thread synchronization and memory usage.